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| The Lowest Degradation Reached by Degrees.
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Chapter 10.—The Lowest Degradation Reached by
Degrees.
15. When the soul then consults
either for itself or for others with a good will towards perceiving
the inner and higher things, such as are possessed in a chaste
embrace, without any narrowness or envy, not individually, but in
common by all who love such things; then even if it be deceived in
anything, through ignorance of things temporal (for its action in
this case is a temporal one), and if it does not hold fast to that
mode of acting which it ought, the temptation is but one common to
man. And it is a great thing so to pass through this life, on which
we travel, as it were, like a road on our return home, that
no
temptation may take us, but what is common to man.768
For this is
a sin, without the body, and must not be reckoned fornication, and
on that account is very easily pardoned. But when the soul does
anything in order to attain those things which are perceived
through the body, through lust of proving or of surpassing or of
handling them, in order that it may place in them its final good,
then whatever it does, it does wickedly, and commits fornication,
sinning against its own body:769
and while snatching from within the
deceitful images of corporeal things, and combining them by vain
thought, so that nothing seems to it to be divine, unless it be of
such a kind as this; by selfish greediness it is made fruitful in
errors, and by selfish prodigality it is emptied of strength. Yet
it would not leap on at once from the commencement to such
shameless and miserable fornication, but, as it is written, “He
that contemneth small things, shall fall by little and little.”770
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